Parti Québécois Failed to Renew Mandate, Analysts Say

OTTAWA — Two obituaries may be written in the crushing defeat of the Parti Québécois in Monday’s election: for separatism as a political force in Quebec in the foreseeable future, and for the party itself, whose aging leaders were brought down by the very issue on which it was founded.

Yet Jean-Marc Léger, the president and chief executive of a Montreal polling firm that bears his name, cautioned against declaring separatism permanently vanquished, saying that by his count, its death sentence has been pronounced at least 25 times since 1974.

“People outside of Quebec don’t understand that separatism will never die,” he said.

That said, Mr. Léger added, the blow dealt to the Parti Québécois means that no party with any aspiration of holding power will openly promote a referendum on separating from Canada for years to come.

“People are fed up with that kind of debate. They want something else,” Mr. Léger said.

For a party created to take Quebec out of Canada, that leaves the Parti Québécois in a difficult spot. In The Toronto Star, the columnist Chantal Hébert wrote that by rejecting its central issue, voters “have inflicted a life-threatening defeat on the Parti Québécois.”

The surviving leadership of the Parti Québécois does have an ominous example in the fate of the Bloc Québécois, an affiliate that runs candidates for the federal Parliament. Although little more than a protest party, it was once so successful that from 1993 to 1997 it formed the official opposition in the House of Commons.

During the last federal election in 2011, however, Quebec voters unexpectedly abandoned the Bloc for the left-of-center New Democratic Party, which previously had elected only a handful of members from the province. The rejection was so firm that some New Democrats were put in office without having even visited the areas that they now represent in Parliament. The Bloc now holds just four seats.

“Perhaps it would have been different if the people in the Parti Québécois would have come to understand the lessons of 2011,” said Claire Durand, a sociologist at Université de Montréal who studies and conducts political polls. Her analysis, she said, indicated that while support for sovereignty, as separation has come to be known in Quebec politics, has generally held at 40 percent of the population since the 1960s, many supporters nevertheless also want to remain in Canada. She said polls in this election showed that was the case for about 20 percent of Parti Québécois backers.

“Look,” she said to separatist politicians in general, “even the people who vote for you don’t want sovereignty.”

While that seems contradictory, Pierre Martin, a professor of political science at the same university, said the paradox was widespread and demonstrated by an informal survey he conducted during a lecture on Tuesday. When he asked how many of his students felt “primarily Canadian,” no hands were raised. “Yet they also wanted nothing to do with sovereignty,” he said.

Mr. Martin’s classroom was not the only place where the Parti Québécois failed to attract young voters. During its glory days from the 1970s up to its narrow loss in a referendum in 1995, it was a movement driven by young followers. Today, Mr. Léger said, those followers, like Pauline Marois, the premier and party leader who resigned on Monday, have aged with their party. She started in politics during the 1970s and turned 65 last month.

The Parti Québécois, Ms. Durand said, was also a victim of its earlier successes, like laws mandating the use of French in large businesses and within government as well as the transfer of some powers from the federal government. Young Quebecers no longer feel uneasy about the future of their culture and do not feel prompted to vote for separatism, she said.

Mr. Martin noted that the 30 legislators the Parti Québécois did manage to elect on Monday included some important figures. Two of them introduced an emotional Ms. Marois on Monday night: Pierre Karl Péladeau, a media mogul who sought office for the first time, and Jean-François Lisée, a journalist, author and longtime party strategist who was a cabinet minister in the now collapsed government.

While Mr. Péladeau shattered the Parti Québécois’ plan to avoid the troublesome referendum issue during the campaign with a fist-pumping call for Quebec as an independent nation, Mr. Martin said that his prominence and business success leave him as an effective voice for the party.

Mr. Léger of the polling firm cautioned that the rest of Canada should not become complacent as the separatist threat fades: “Sooner or later you will have a crisis and something will happen if English Canada does not take advantage of the situation.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Parti Québécois Failed to Renew Mandate, Analysts Say. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe